Critic Reviews

The best role playing game to come out in years. Excellent graphics and sound, richly detailed environments, an incredibly friendly user interface, excellent documentation, and hours upon hours of gameplay make this game well worth the price and a true pleasure to play. RPG fans, your Nirvana awaits.

Dungeons & Dragons fanatics will delight in this game because it’s one of the first to use advanced D&D rules. But Baldur’s Gate is put together with such a user-friendly interface that total novices will enjoy it just as much. The excellent engine, great graphics, and meticulous attention to detail made this game so thoroughly addictive and fun that the PC version sold more than a million copies. Mac players will no doubt increase that number.

Finally, everything fits for Baldur's Gate. It is a definite step forward in the RPG genre. Wonderful graphical display, and ambient sounds. Of course Baldur's Gate is not flawless, as a few bugs bog it down. That doesn't deter from what this game has done for the RPG fans.

Either way, this is an amazing game. Baldur's Gate is a RPG which manages to get right everything about the tried and extremely true AD&D revision 2 gaming system. This is, without a doubt, the closest thing out there to actually getting together with a bunch of your friends on a Sunday afternoon, taking your characters into a dungeon, and using you own BOO to find out if that bottomless pit was actually bottomless.

Do you remember the sadness you felt when you read the last word in that book that simply enthralled you? That's just how I feel having just completed Baldur's Gate. It's been a long haul, more than two months of solid game-play, but I have been absolutely engrossed by every minute! Very few games earn such an accolade from this reviewer.

Perhaps the most interesting and important thing about Baldur's Gate is not that it's a great game, but that it came along at precisely the right time to revive a dying PC RPG market. The Infinity Engine, developed by Bioware, has since been used to develop at least three other games and was the template for the massively popular Neverwinter Nights and its exceptional Aurora Toolset, a set of software tools that have allowed literally thousands of would-be game designers to get their feet wet by making playable modules for their friends as well as their portfolios. In essence, although Baldur's Gate was not the only RPG made for PCs in the late 1990s, it was the RPG that sparked a gaming renaissance for computer users the world over.

If you remember playing Dungeons & Dragons fondly (and who doesn't!), and have always wished for a good version on your own computer, your wish has been granted. You may have tried some D&D based computer games before, and come away dissatisfied. Baldur's Gate is worth another look, as it is a very faithful recreation of an extended D&D campaign, with your computer serving as the Dungeon Master, all of the Non-Player Characters, and all of your quest-mates. For those of you heathens who have not played D&D, you don't have to worry! Baldur's Gate has removed the need to learn books full of arcane rules. You no longer need to own a small bag of weird dice, or keep character charts, or detailed maps.

In the grand tradition of the old Gold Box AD&D games, Baldur’s Gate (BG) from BioWare/Interplay (Black Isle Studios) attempts to recapture the kind of engrossing, "can’t-stop-playing" RPG experience that entertained so many people in the 80s and early 90s. Playable in either single- or multi-player, you guide a party of up to six characters through an expansive world of mystery and danger.

Whether a die-hard player of Dungeons and Dragons looking for a game to emulate your favorite features from the classic, or a casual Role-player who has never even heard of the game and desires only to have fun, you will reap quite a bit of pleasure from this expansive journey into fantasy. If you have yet to experience the joy one can obtain from Baldur's Gate, I highly recommend you grab the game as soon as possible and find out what you have been missing. But before you delve in to deeply, remember to keep away from those giant spiders…sometimes they can get nasty.

Ok, I must first admit to wanting to play this game for ages. I have played Diablo (I can't wait for Diablo II) so I thought that they would be similar, I was to be proven wrong, what sort of RPG requires 5 whole CD's, yes, thats FIVE CD's.

Please give this game a try. Even if you have never played a true RPG before this is well worth your time. I started playing this game on Thursday the day before Christmas at about 10 p.m. that night and the next thing I noticed was that it was somewhere around 4 a.m. Baldur’s Gate is completely addictive, and has lived up to almost all of the hype that came its way. This one is definitely going to be remembered for a long time.

Very few computer games based upon Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, the most influential role-playing game system of them all, have been released over the past several years, and those that did make it to retail shelves have been ill-conceived, substandard products. In that context, it's hardly surprising that Baldur's Gate, which many gamers suspected would finally bring AD&D back to the forefront of computer gaming, has been one of the most anxiously anticipated role-playing games ever.

But Baldur's Gate is well worth the money - on a dollar-value basis, it may be the best buy of the year. It's a huge, sprawling, wonderfully involved game that makes you feel as though you've read a fantasy trilogy by game's end.

If you have not played Baldur’s Gate and enjoy RPGs, you owe it to yourself to do so. Really, there is no other way around it – it’s that good. Baldur’s Gate really did (re-)start the modern RPG genre, and for good reason. Either play it to see where it all came from, or just because it’s worth it. It deserves your attention.

Hot on the heels of the fantastic Fallout 2, Baldur's Gate delivers an epic fantasy set in the Forgotten Realms of the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons universe. It's a tribute to the devotion and creativity of the game's designers that Baldur's Gate works beautifully as both a treat for AD&D devotees and as a broadly appealing RPG for everyone else.

Baldur's Gate is a truly epic game, spanning several towns, forests, barren land, and big cities. You meet dozens of interesting people and are given almost as many quests while you learn more about what's happening in The Sword Coast. I find that Baldur's Gate is an incredible game, and it is one of the rare games that I want to play even after the review is done. It will take a long time to finish the game, which will tide most of us over until multiplayer is added. Hopefully, all of the expansion packs and sequels will be released for Mac as well. I definitely recommend that all role-playing and adventure fans check out Baldur's Gate.

Baldur’s Gate is a fine game, well worth the effort it took to port it to the Mac. It offers the definitive computer version of AD&D, a good story, a huge number of places to explore and things to do, and stays fresh even after weeks of constant play. Discussing the game with some PC users who had played it when it first came out, I found that everyone still had vivid stories to tell about their favorite strategy or some difficult battle that they managed to win against all odds. Afterwards, one of the players was inspired to reinstall it on their PC to play some more. That simple action pretty much says it all.

As a single-player product, BALDUR’S GATE aspires to greatness—a good engine, nice graphics, a real D&D feel—but has its share of flaws, particularly with AD&D-style combat As a multiplayer product, it sports some interesting features and is more enjoyable by virtue of having other real people participating in the adventure. Anyone considering BALDUR should do so with an eye to the multiplayer aspect to get the most for their money.

What makes Baldur’s Gate so fun are the little touches that, for the most part, Black Isle also included in its Fallout series. Character is a big issue, and every major non-player character (NPC) in the game has a defined character -- the few who can travel with the player even have scripts for how to act under certain situations (and those scripts can be altered, if the player so desires).

Despite our nitpicky issues with "graphical cleanliness" and clunky multiplayer, Baldur's Gate simply shines. We were not able to obtain a review copy for this game so I just went out and bought it, somewhat reluctantly because I didn't know what to expect. Well after everything's been said and done, I don't regret any of the money I spent on Baldur's Gate because if nothing else, it's a game that delivers real value for your dollar. It should take around 100 hours to solve the game, and if you like dilly dallying on the subquests like we do, Baldur's Gate could easily take 150 hours of game play to beat. The variations in race, class, and alignment will probably spur most players to play the game over and try it with a different character. I know I'd like to try everything over again as an evil character. Bottom line: if you have even the slightest interest in RPG or fantasy games, then Baldur's Gate is a must have game.

There are many other facets of Baldur's Gate that I could get into, but if I keep going here I'll have to charge Applelinks for two reviews. The game's setting is huge, but it has to be to contain the multi-layered story. The control system is complex, but it has to be to offer players the freedom of finding their own way through the game. Baldur's Gate is an epic, and finishing it is an accomplishment. You'll want to hold onto the box so you can put it up on the bookshelf alongside Tolkien, Lewis and Homer.